Finding the blind spots in your network security knowledge

Today, cybercrime is more prevalent than ever before as it provides easy pickings for the modern digitally-smart criminal. Cyber attacks are more advanced and audacious, as well as more varied in focus, from stealing intellectual property to writing malicious code, to lodging political protests. On the other side, many enterprises cannot respond in an appropriate and timely manner, with an attacker being able to hide in an organization for 146 days before being discovered.

This failure to tackle the cyber threat can put an organization’s very existence at risk. After all, few enterprises can afford the reputational damage, system downtime, regulatory penalties and, of course, financial cost of a cyber attack. The average total cost of a data breach in 2015 hit an all-time high of $3.79 million.

How can enterprises set up and run an effective security approach? The cost of setting up an internal Security Operations Centre is hugely prohibitive, let alone the resourcing challenge of finding the people to help you strategize what your SOC should look like.

At another level, the very speed of change across the security landscape is proving almost impossible for enterprises to keep pace with. The standard response to cybercrime has, until now, been first to monitor and then respond to threats. But the speed at which the threat picture changes means that this response is invariably too late. In addition, the response has typically been to ‘known’ threats, but what about the threats you don’t even know exist: the blind spots in your defense? That’s a crucial question in today’s sophisticated, agile threat environment.